Q: How did you learn about the case of Nancy Clem, and how
did you research her life story?

A: Some years ago I was looking for a new project and
thought it might be fun to write something about Indiana—after all, that’s
where I live. So I grabbed a few microfilm reels of the Indianapolis News from
the 1870s.

As I cranked away I kept coming across vague but intriguing
references to a Mrs. Clem. The News assumed readers knew who she was—and while
it was pretty obvious she had done something
wrong, it wasn’t at all clear what.

I had blundered into the middle of what sounded like an
interesting story. It was. I discovered an absolutely fascinating
protagonist.

Here was a woman who stood trial four times for murder, who
allegedly invented the Ponzi scheme, and who, in her later years, sold patent
medicine door-to-door while representing herself as a “female physician.”

I began to read newspapers published in Indianapolis and
elsewhere. Digitization was a godsend; by searching various newspaper databases
I could track Clem almost continuously from 1868, when the murders of Jacob and
Nancy Jane Young took place, until her death in 1897.

Luckily for me, Clem couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble,
so she kept making the news. I also relied on trial transcripts, manuscript
censuses, genealogies, city and county histories, prison records, and maps.

I had to piece together her story from thousands of
fragments. Because Clem was barely literate, she didn’t leave behind letters or
diaries. So there’s much about her that we just don’t know, and will probably
never know.

But I think that’s the reason I found her so enthralling; I
probably wouldn’t have been half as interested if she weren’t so mysterious.

Q: What type of business was she involved in, and what role
did she play in developing the Ponzi scheme?

A: That’s the 64 million dollar question. Like much else
concerning Nancy Clem, I don’t know for certain.

I do know she was no stranger to business. During her time
as a widow she probably helped make ends meet by loaning out money she
inherited from her first husband, who died in 1857, and charging interest; she
also took in boarders.

When she married Frank Clem she took out a prenup that gave
her the right to conduct her own business (without such an agreement, any profits
a married woman earned legally belonged to her husband). As far as I can tell,
up until the time she met Jacob Young, her dealings were perfectly legitimate.

Then things changed. We’ll probably never know exactly what
Clem, Young, and their partner, William J. Abrams, were up to, but my best
guess is that their business was a variation on what would later be called a
Ponzi scheme (named after Charles Ponzi, who bilked investors out of millions
of dollars in the 1920s).

They borrowed large sums of money at interest rates as high as
25 percent. Their clients didn’t realize that the “interest” they earned came out
of subsequent investors’ money or sometimes even out of their own principal.

In the end, some people actually made quite a lot of money.
Others, like Clem’s dressmaker, who invested her life savings of $900, lost
everything.

Indiana journalists would later claim that Clem invented
this scam. They also reported that she taught it to Ferdinand Ward, who used a
similar scheme to swindle former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant out of all his
money. I wish these accounts were true, since they would make for such a great
story. Alas, there’s little evidence to support either contention.

Surely this couldn’t have been the first time a con artist
promised and delivered “big percentage” by robbing Peter to pay Paul. If it
was, I think we’d have to award the honor to Jacob Young, who seems to have
been transacting shady business deals nearly a year before Clem joined his
ring.

Ferdinand Ward did have a brief career as a bank clerk in
Indianapolis—he only lasted two weeks before he was fired—but Nancy Clem was
incarcerated at the time.

I suppose it’s possible he visited her in the county jail and
asked her to teach him the tricks of her trade, but I doubt it. Clem rarely agreed
to receive visitors other than her friends, family, and attorneys, so it’s hard
to imagine her agreeing to see a young man she didn’t know.

Q: How would you describe the relationship between Nancy
Clem and Jacob and Nancy Jane Young?

A: In some ways this is the saddest part, because this is a
story about people who allegedly conspired to murder their friends. It’s a bit
complicated— please bear with me.

Nancy Clem (née Hartman), like the Youngs, grew up in Pike
Township, a (then) rural community northwest of Indianapolis. While Clem left
for Indianapolis before Jacob Young arrived in Pike Township, Jacob was good
friends with William J. Abrams and with Clem’s younger brother, Silas Hartman. The
Abrams and Hartman families had always been close. So when everybody eventually
ended up in the city, they naturally started socializing together.

Clem first met the Youngs at Abrams’s New Year’s Day party. Young
and Abrams were already doing business together and Clem joined them shortly
thereafter.

She seems to have been friendly with both Jacob and Nancy
Jane; while you have to take Clem’s words with more than a grain of salt, she
said she was “quite intimate” with Nancy Jane and thought her a “very clever
woman.” “Intimate,” by the way, didn’t have the kind of sexual connotations in
the nineteenth century that it might today.

Sex did play a role, but only in prosecutors’ imagination. Benjamin
Harrison’s closing argument, for example, included this statement: “[Clem], a married woman— without the
knowledge of her husband . . .is found frequently visiting the house of Jacob
Young, and going into a room with him privately and apart from others. What
does this mean?”

But there’s absolutely no evidence of any romantic
relationship between Clem and Young. Harrison was just using a tried and true
legal tactic—making the case by tarnishing the defendant’s character.

Something happened between Clem and Young in late August or
early September 1868, but it wasn’t about sex. It was about money.

Prosecuting attorneys offered two theories; take your pick:(1) Clem owed Young a lot of money and he
threatened to tell her clueless husband about her shady business deals if she
didn’t pay up or (2) Clem knew that Young carried large sums of cash on his
person and decided she wanted it for herself.

For whatever reason, Jacob and Nancy Jane Young ended up
dead on the banks of the White River. And their good friends, Nancy Clem, Silas
Hartman, and William J. Abrams were charged with first-degree murder.

Q: What surprised you most in the course of your research
for this book?

A: That’s a hard one to answer because there were so many
surprises. I was surprised, though I guess I shouldn’t have been, by how much
the trial rhetoric revolved around whether women, especially married women,
should participate in business.

Prosecutors called Clem a faithless wife because she did
business without her husband’s knowledge; defense attorneys called her a
faithful wife because she contributed to her family’s income.

I was also surprised by the mix of county authorities’ amateurism
and professionalism. Of course I’m looking back from a 21st-century
perspective, so I’m probably not being entirely fair.

On one hand, the coroner had the presence of mind to order
autopsies, which was how investigators found out that the Youngs had been shot
with two different weapons. Their murderers may have hoped for a ruling of murder-suicide,
and the discovery that Jacob died from a shotgun wound and Nancy from a pistol
shot made that verdict unlikely.

On the other hand, police measured the woman’s footprints
discovered at the crime scene with a green pawpaw stick—not the most reliable
of instruments. Two codefendants—William J. Abrams and Silas Hartman—were
allowed to share a jail cell. Future U.S. president Benjamin Harrison prosecuted
a woman who was almost his next-door neighbor. He lived just a block away.

And I can’t resist mentioning that two important characters
in the story were named Pet. One Pet was Clem’s niece, a 15-year-old girl.The other was a horse.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on two projects that I hope eventually will
turn into books. One is an account of the infamous Donner Party that tries to
put Native Peoples and Californios into
the story.

The other is a study of 1970s and 1980s American homes. I’m
interested in architecture and furnishings (I’m hoping that Avocado appliances
will make prominent appearances), changes in gender roles and family life, and
new technologies. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about early microwave ovens.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’d just like to thank you for your excellent questions
and for your interest in The Notorious Mrs. Clem. This has been fun.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).